A series of World Cup documentaries highlights the peculiar ways football has
changed – and shows that modern trends distort our memories of how it used
to be played

The first thing that struck me was the boots. They were black. Every single pair on the pitch. None were white, or red, or orange, or pink. Just black. Black as Bovril.

I found it odd. Which, now I think about it, is itself odd. Only quite recently – within the last 10 years or so – has it become the convention for footballers to wear colourful boots. For the majority of my football-watching life, they wore black and black only. At the time, it seemed the natural order of things. I would have been bemused if not outraged to learn that, by the 2014 World Cup, it would be normal to wear boots that not only were coloured, but didn’t even match: left boot in blue, say, and right boot in pink. Yet now, to my 21st-century eyes, watching old footage of teams in black boots feels peculiar. Somehow it makes the players appear clumsier, even flat-footed. They look as if they’re all clumping around in school shoes.

I was thinking about this while watching World Cup Films, the Fifa-commissioned series that’s been running on BBC Two over the past few weekends. Each edition is a 90-minute documentary telling the story of a single World Cup. Yet the stories aren’t why I watch them. I watch them for the skin-prickling weirdness of observing how football has changed down the years, almost without my noticing. I started watching football in 1990, when I was nine, yet today the footage of that year’s World Cup looks so alien to me I can’t quite believe the tournament took place in my lifetime. What was once normal is now strange.

So the boots, first of all. Then the ball. I don’t know what they made footballs out of in the 1950s, but my best guess would be granite. The ball would bounce heavily, even sullenly. Seeming to resent being booted into the air, it would gain its revenge by cracking open the skull of any man reckless enough to head it. By the Sixties the ball was lighter; now it was made merely of solid oak. Long-range shots would roll gradually in the direction of the goal. Inexplicably, despite having had about a fortnight to lie down and block its path, the goalkeeper would often allow it to trundle under him and into the net.

But it isn’t only goalkeepers who seem to have been slower in the past. Outfield players seem to have run more slowly, too. (Understandable, I suppose, given that they were wearing school shoes.) After the first few of Fifa’s World Cup documentaries I began to wonder whether, until about 1970, the game was in fact played underwater. Still, if it was, the players’ breathing apparatus was well concealed. Or maybe they did without it, scornfully believing that oxygen canisters were for cissies. Footballers were men, in those days.

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I’m not saying footballers were less skilful in the distant past. Cruyff, Beckenbauer, Eusebio, Puskas, Moore, Platini – these were players of indisputable gifts. And Pele was immeasurably more talented than the forwards in the current Brazil team. God knows why they keep picking Fred. They’d be better off picking Wilma.

What I would say, though, is that in general, previous generations of players looked a lot less athletic. The torso of a leading international footballer today is a honed and toned triangle: broad shoulders, waspish waist. It’s the sort of gym-buffed figure that the skin-tight shirts of the Uruguay squad are designed to show off. Few players of the Seventies and Eighties would have looked quite so at home in a 2014-style kit as Edinson Cavani does. Diego Maradona’s shirts looked skin-tight, but I’m not sure they were designed to be. (Curiously, although shirts were baggier in the Eighties, shorts were skimpier. They might as well have been prancing around in swimming trunks.)

Players of the past spent less time not only in the gym, but in front of the mirror. From 1974 to 1990, it was seemingly required by Fifa that every World Cup goalkeeper had hair the size of a laurel bush. Alan Rough (Scotland, 1978), Harald Schumacher (West Germany, 1982), Dave Beasant (the England bench, 1990)… it was as if they were wearing busbies made of curls. Perhaps in the dressing room beforehand they stuffed packets of sandwiches into them, to be consumed during lulls in play.

Watch the documentaries in chronological order and you see moustaches come and go, and beards, and sideburns, and mullets. For decades, meanwhile, players were apparently content for their forearms to be the same colour as their faces – something no modern professional, with his season ticket for the local tattoo parlour, would even countenance.

But enough about fashion. Back to the play. Until the mid 1990s, pitches appear to have been bogs, ploughed fields or sandpits. And referees, to the modern eye, were heartlessly lenient: at the 1982 World Cup the unpunished assaults on Maradona ceased only when he got himself sent off for kicking back. If Arjen Robben had been born 30 years earlier, he’d be an amputee.

Anyway: it’s all been fascinating to watch. Again, I’m not saying football is necessarily better today; merely that events – even those from your own lifetime – look different when viewed through modern eyes, rather than contemporary ones.

In any case, it’s rarely wise for the present to congratulate itself on not being the past. Presenting Fantasy Football League on BBC Two in the mid Nineties, Frank Skinner and David Baddiel had a regular feature in which they would laugh at footage of Fifties centre-forwards tripping over the ball. They named the feature “Old Football Was Rubbish”. Yet now the football of the mid Nineties is old football, too, and archives of the period demonstrate quite clearly that for every Romario there were at least 89 Carlton Palmers. One day, the World Cup of 2014 will look quaint and comical, too, but for what reasons, we can only guess.

One thing I’m fairly sure of, though: multi-coloured footwear is here to stay. At Manchester United, Michael Keane, the 21-year-old centre-half, is nicknamed “Ref”. This is not a tribute to his air of authority, or his insistence on always playing by the rules. It’s because, like a referee, he still wears black boots.